How to hack together your own crosspost programme

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The success of Airbnb in the early days was based on a simple trick: crosspost your content to a community you assumed to be your target audience. In the case of Airbnb this was Craigslist which had one thing Airbnb did not have - a massive user base.

What happened was that Airbnb found a weakness in Craigslist's code. This allowed them to cross-post their own listings to Craigslist, which gave them access to Craigslist's much larger audience. People interested in booking a stay would be directed back to Airbnb's own site to make the transaction.

Your own crosspost programme

1. Identify your target audience

First of all, you need to identify people who are a part of your target audience. Based on that you can figure out where to crosspost your content. This is a very important step to take your time to write down the answers to the following questions:

What problems does my company's product or service solve?

Who are my current or future customers?

What does my customer want?

Who is my competition?

2. Search for websites

After identifying a group of your target audience we need to discover websites your target audience visits. I put together some actionable tips you can find easily websites and blogs, forums or communities.

Use google search operators

If you are familiar with SEO, Google advanced search operators are nothing new. With the help of the search operators, it is easy to find the right websites with guest post opportunities. On the Ahref Blog I found this great tip:

Find and share your content on forums and communities - search your_niche forum or your_niche community

For SaaS crosspost your content to websites like Indiehackers or Hackernoon

Find your competitors

If you know your competitors you can look to see if there is a possibility to crosspost your content on their site like Airbnb did.To easily find all your competitors you can use websites like Alterntiveto or check Producthunt similar products. You can also easily check popular content from your competitors and find out where they do crossposts or share their content.

Survey your target audience

If you identified your target audience you might try and send out a survey. You can use tools like Typeform or Fast Poll. You could ask them, "What are your three favorite websites, blogs or communities for learning JavaScript."?

Crowdsourced List with websites to cross or guest post

If you have no idea where to start you should take a look at our resource page. We crowdsourced a list with websites you can add crossposts or at least write guestposts. We categorized the website by their area, Twitter Followers and Total visits.

After you identify the websites put them together and rank them by categories like "perfect match to my niche", "total visits", "cross/guest post possibility" or "Social Media followers".

4. Broaden your list

After ranking your websites you can do one last research to broaden your list. With tools like SimilarWeb, SemRush or just Google you can find similar websites like the ones, you have ranked. In google just type "similar website like" or use the search functionality of SimilarWeb to find other similar websites.

Crosspost programme for Growthhacklist

Let's take a look at a possible crosspost programme for Growthhacklist. First of all, I need to identify my audience. The current users of the database are indie developers, bloggers and people working in Marketing. I think in the future I can add small and medium startups and also founders of E-Shops to my audience. The main purpose of Growthhacklist is to offer tools and help, in the form of articles, insights, and interviews, to find easy methods and ideas to grow a business. A first and quick search allowed me to identify the following website, communities and forums.